Fate Accelerated Edition

Let’s face it: most roleplaying games aren’t grab-and-go. Giant books and prep work out the ying-yang can be fun if you’ve got the time, but what if you don’t? What if you’re looking for a last minute game? What if you’re new to the RPG world and want a no hassle way to try one out? What if you’re introducing your kids to RPGs and want something easily accessible for them that won’t bore you to tears? We’ve got a solution: Fate Accelerated Edition.

Fate Accelerated, or FAE, is a condensed version of the popular Fate Core system that brings all the flexibility and power of Fate in an easily digestible—and quickly read—package. With FAE, you and your friends can step into the world of your favorite books, movies, and TV or you can create a world of your own. And set up is simple—you can be playing in minutes. Whether you’re new to RPGs or an expert gamer, FAEbrings something special to the table.

Is Fate Accelerated Edition an expansion? A fresh system adaptation? A quick-start guide? Fred Hicks suggests that it and Fate Core are better viewed as points of a Fate spectrum than as standalone entities. Maybe that’s true, but it’s awkward from a critical perspective, so I’ve chosen to review it as a separate entity. Unfortunately, the problem with this approach is that comparisons to Fate Core are as inevitable as they are unfavourable.

It’s not that a stripped down, simplified, newbie-friendly version of Fate Core is without merit – more that I think FAE does not successfully achieve those design goals. The most alien elements of gaming in Fate – aspect invocations and compels, creating aspects and stunts from scratch, how stress and consequences diverge from traditional hit points – are all presented unchanged in FAE, minus the play guidance. (Although the more restricted list of stunt options are welcome, helping players to choose stunts faster.) Meanwhile skills –...See more the most conventional element of Fate Core, at least from a traditional roleplayer’s perspective – are replaced by approaches. Instead of just describing what you’re doing (Fighting, Driving, building Rapport), FAE encourages you to describe how you’re doing it (Quickly, Cleverly, Forcefully) and assigns mechanical bonuses according to your character’s preferred approach.

My biggest problem with the approach system is that, instead of speeding up play, it actually slows things down. It’s usually pretty obvious whether an action falls under the Shoot skill or the Notice skill. It’s harder to determine if a player’s description of an attack is best described as Clever or Sneaky. When your GM isn’t arguing the toss over every other action, you usually get the opposite problem – it’s trivially easy for players to describe almost any action as using almost any approach, which means using their character’s best approach most of the time. And since every player’s best approach is capped at the same value, all characters becomes mechanically identical.

Still, other than that, FAE is basically Fate Core, which I love. And it seems churlish to complain about one when the other is available to download for free on literally the same webpage. It’s a shame though – Fate is excellent, but not the easiest game to teach newcomers, and it would be great to have a mini-game that helps GMs do precisely that. That’s not a niche Fate Accelerated is filling for me.

(I never review a game I haven’t played or run. Check out http://michaelduxbury.com/category/reviews/ for more RPG reviews.)

Andy BApril 27, 2014 4:48 am UTC

PURCHASER

I really hope that FAE wins the new Origins awards. I really like this system. Its so universal and simplified. I read they were going to republish Dresden in this system. (I can't wait to get my hands on that one. The Dresden universe is a nice source for urban fantasy.)

To me any system one can plop on a table and then hash out some ideas with his players and simultaneously make characters and come up with an adventure to play out later that night is just choice. ICONS has this nailed down pretty well, but they have distinquished company with FAE. I win with both because the systems overlap a lot since both are descendants of the FATE system. Time spent scouring rule books should be used to creatively continuing the story.

I just hope Shadowrun 5th Edition doesn't win. Come on. I remember when my whole gaming group had to buy a round of 3rd Edition rule books over a decade ago. How many times can they retread Adepts, the Matrix, and cyberware? Answer: As many times as we...See more buy it.

I'm a huge fan of Fate Core, and I wanted to give this slimmed down version a try. While some things you might be used to in an RPG like "rolling for Lore" don't quite fit this model and have to be reworked (which can be a good thing,) prett [...]

I got both Accelerated and Core. Fate is a different enough system you really need the explanations and examples from Core. But once you understood the terminology, Accelerated really took off and worked better and faster. [...]

I have never used FATE Core rules yet but I am playing a game that will be utilizing those rules this weekend. They are easy and simple to learn, its a great system to use when trying to engulf your players in the story of your game. The accelerated ed [...]

Fate Accelerated is just the RPG I was looking for when I got it, fast, easy to learn, easy to run, you can teach the rules as you generate characters, you can write your first adventure while the players make their characters. The best part, it's free [...]

FATE Accelerated is fantastic! I have yet to play a game of it, but that will be remedied in November. I have never read a game or a system that allows so many possibilities for players and GM's. Literally any kind of setting can be played in using thi [...]

These products were created by scanning an original printed edition. Most older books are in scanned image format because original digital layout files never existed or were no longer available from the publisher.

For PDF download editions, each page has been run through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to attempt to decipher the printed text. The result of this OCR process is placed invisibly behind the picture of each scanned page, to allow for text searching. However, any text in a given book set on a graphical background or in handwritten fonts would most likely not be picked up by the OCR software, and is therefore not searchable. Also, a few larger books may be resampled to fit into the system, and may not have this searchable text background.

For printed books, we have performed high-resolution scans of an original hardcopy of the book. We essentially digitally re-master the book. Unfortunately, the resulting quality of these books is not as high. It's the problem of making a copy of a copy. The text is fine for reading, but illustration work starts to run dark, pixellating and/or losing shades of grey. Moiré patterns may develop in photos. We mark clearly which print titles come from scanned image books so that you can make an informed purchase decision about the quality of what you will receive.

Original electronic format

These ebooks were created from the original electronic layout files, and therefore are fully text searchable. Also, their file size tends to be smaller than scanned image books. Most newer books are in the original electronic format. Both download and print editions of such books should be high quality.